Author: Matt Zbrog

This is going to hurt a bit.

But it’s time to fess up.

I’m kind of scared.

Let me work up to it with some background.

Before 7^th grade, I was a clueless amoeba of a music listener.  I had a cd and tape player combo boombox, but very few albums.  To reference how meager my allowance was, and also showcase how poor my taste was, here were the CDs I owned:

• Ace of Base – The Sign
• Top Gun Soundtrack
• Star Trek: The Next Generation (Soundtrack to the episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1”)
• Some sort of techno collection.  It included LaBouche, Salt N Pepa, and I have no idea what else.
• Dire Straits — Brothers in Arms (stolen from Dad)
• The Beatles — Sgt Pepper

With no fear, I would spin those albums constantly.  Especially that TNG soundtrack.  I’d crank the volume while I was reading, drawing, practicing transcendental meditation (aka thinking), and basically just nerding out real good.  My mom for sure thought her only son was a lunatic, running around in his room, listening to shitty music, talking to himself, and scribbling endlessly in little notebooks.  The signs were there.  But god bless her, she let me be.

The good old days.

We loved some weird stuff as kids in the 90’s, and we loved it hard.  We had no other choice.  My feet could not reach the gas pedal on either the Accord or the Civic and my 5$/week allowance was largely based on completion of chores (not worth it).  I think we might have been the last generation to feel the joy and pain of being forced to make do with what we had.  Any drooling 7 year old with a laptop or iphone can now find any song ever written and listen to it for free.  But way back then, you were a slave to whatever you had.  And you didn’t mind being a slave.  Danger Zone is a helluva tune as it is – but when it’s all you got besides Ace of Base, it becomes the best thing in the world.

But it wasn’t best enough.

The boombox had a radio and I had a small voice recorder (stolen from Dad).  I’d spend hours turning the dial in between kroq, klos, arrow 93.1, and occasionally stopping on power 106 (which was scary).  When I heard a song I liked, I’d quickly hit record on the voice recorder and capture a terribly low quality version of the song — minus the first 30 seconds or so, and often minus the last 30 seconds (thanks to an annoying DJ).  I would then drive my family and friends insane by playing them back repeatedly.

One particularly epic and eclectic mix included:

• Oasis — Wonderwall
• Stone Temple Pilots — Creep
• Bush – Machine Head
• Coolio — Gangsta’s Paradise

Using the temporal-geography-locator app in my brain, that puts us at about 1995 or so, maybe 1996.

Everything changed in 1997, when Alex, my only other musically-obsessive friend, gave me a copy of Blink 182’s Dude Ranch (which his mother was going to make him throw away because of the bull testicles on the cover).

It was pure, raw energy all the way through.  And it felt familiar.  It was a bizarre form of déjà-vu.  Every time I hoped a chord would come… it did.  There wasn’t a single song I didn’t love.  I couldn’t explain it.  It might have had something to do with the fact that I was singing about my future:

Laughing at the bands we hate, all the spots we used to skate
They’re still there, but we’ve gone our own ways
I know it’s for the best but sometimes I wonder
Will I ever have friends like you again?

Is it too much to ask for the things to work out this time?
I’m only asking for what is mine
I wanted everything, I got it and now I’m gonna
Throw it away, I’ll throw it away (yeah)

You’re gonna drown in the mess you make
Your self-inflicted hate
You turn your back on the friends you lose
When they don’t follow all your rules

But people are what they wanna be
They’re not lemmings to the sea
Maybe it’s time you looked at yourself
And stop blaming life on someone else

Blink-182 – Lemmings

I knew I was on to something.  But I couldn’t find the URL for Pandora back then.  So I sat with my voice recorder, waiting for something similar.  I never clicked with Green Day.  I bought an album by The Offspring as a result of peer pressure.  Nothing worked.  I waited for over a year.

And holy hell, on June 1^st, 1999… one week before I graduated Junior High…

Enema of the State came out.

Not coincidentally, there was a huge tropical weather system that delivered enormous waves every day that summer.  No hardboards allowed.  I lived half a block from the beach.  This was a dream come true.  My friends and I had double overhead waves to bodyboard all to ourselves.  And that boombox would come along and sit on the sand next to us, blasting Enema of the State.  It was the soundtrack to that season of my life.  Nothing could have fit better.

Blink 182 – Dumpweed

And in the days leading up to my first day of high school, I held onto that album like a childhood stuffed animal.  I had no idea what to expect.  The only people I knew there were Mark Hoppus, Tom DeLonge, and Travis Barker.  Their songs were all I knew about adolescence (dangerous in retrospect).

My first day of school, my very first class was advanced English.  It was full of 10^th graders, I was the only freshman.  In the first 10 minutes, Mrs. Harris decided to pair the class up for a project.  I thought it would be sweet to be paired with Allison Metchikoff (what a fox).  Or that getting paired with Trevor Burdge could’ve help my popularity.  I guess I didn’t care all that much.  Just please, God, give me anyone but Chris Crockett.

But of course, the teacher’s voice interrupted my prayers:

“Matt Zbrog, why don’t you sit with Chris Crockett?”

Uh, okay Mrs. Harris, I can answer that, but it’s going to take a while:

He hasn’t shut up since the bell rang.  He’s got liberty spikes.  Patches everywhere.  He smells like cigarettes and maybe alcohol and definitely BO.  He has facial hair.  I get the feeling he’s going to stab me with a crude type of knife in the hallway later.  He carved a swastika into his desk instead of doing the first writing exercise.

Of course the screenwriters of my life made sure the predictable irony panned out, and I was worshipping the guy by the time class was over.  I was lucky enough to have him in 6^th period French, too.  Awesome way to start and finish the day.

The kid was a genius.  The best human blog I’ve ever met.  He would constantly befuddle teachers and make them question their profession.  He had the revolutionary politics card down.  He taught me how to make my Bible teacher cry.  He showed me the ropes.  And of course, we debated music.  He was punk personified.

I’d fight hard for local, contemporary talent like Homegrown.  He’d fight back with gutterpunk oldies like The SubHumAns and The Descendants.   He taught me about history, like The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The Clash. He’d flat out refuse some of my picks (Rufio/Yellowcard) but use them as a basis to recommend truly incredible bands like NOFX – their epic song  The Decline changed my life.

The two of us together was like The Breakfast Club but with less Emilio Estevez.

So when Chris Crockett got expelled the next year for getting drunk and getting a blowjob from Crystal in the chapel area [how in the world is that a crime], there was a vacuum.  I had to find my own stuff.

I started going to punk shows every weekend.  Sometimes weekdays.  I was making more and more friends based on shared taste in music — a trend that continues to this day.  My network was growing.  The internet was barely beginning to open itself up to music and Napster, and I was sifting through it for any scraps I could get.  I was going to venues to see every act.  There was a new EP circulating every month.  I was on the front lines.

I was growing up, and so were the bands.  The Taking Back Sunday demo came out and dropped an atomic bomb on my brain in 2001 (The album version, Tell All Your Friends, would wait until 2002).  These guys were smart in a genre that historically put a priority on being dumb.  But they didn’t care, and they decided to go on being smart, making fun of past idiot bands in the process.

Get up, get up
Come on, come on, lets go
There’s just a few things
I think that you should know
Those words at best
Were worse than teenage poetry
Fragment ideas
And too many pronouns
Stop it, come on
You’re not making sense now
You can’t make them want you
They’re all just laughing

Literate and stylish (literate and stylish)
Kissable and quiet (kissable and quiet)
Well that’s what girls dreams are made of
And that’s all you need to know (and that’s all you need to know)
You have it or you don’t (you have it or you don’t)

Taking Back Sunday – Timberwolves At New Jersey

I wrote every single lyric to Tell All Your Friends on the cover of my SAT booklet when I was finished early and not allowed to leave.  I think it was probably the reason I got a perfect score on the verbal section.  All those analogies.

Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon proved that TBS wasn’t a one off (even though Jesse Lacey wrote lyrics on both albums).  The floodgates were opening.  It was the era of song titles the size of gigantic sentences.  And while other kids were singing Limp Bizkit to get out their rage, I was singing along to one of the most eloquent ways to tell someone to go kill themselves:

Brand New- Seventy Times Seven

I was just beginning to interact with girls (he’s a late bloomer).  I fell in love over and over again, for no real reason.  I used a large vocabulary and got strange looks.  I often wrote in notebooks about my “emotions and feelings”, and now here were these bands that did it, too.  It was instant kinship.

People laughed and called it emo.  You know what I call it?  Being fucking 17.

I went to see Fall Out Boy at Chain Reaction in 2003 when they opened for a hardcore band.  There were harsh vibes all around us.  But I was still up front with my idiot friend, singing every word, because we knew where the talent was.

She took me down and said,
“Boys like you are overrated, so save your breath.”
Loaded words and loaded friends
Are loaded guns to our heads

Cause every pane of glass that your pebbles tap negates the pains I went through to avoid you
And every little pat on the shoulder for attention fails to mention I still hate you

You want apologies
Girl, you might hold your breath
Until your breathing stops forever, forever
(…every pane of glass) the only thing you’ll get
Is this curse on your lips:
(every pane of) I hope they taste of me forever

Fall Out Boy – Chicago Is So Two Years Ago

Woah, right?

I know!

It was perfect for its time and place.  Like rollerblades, or bellbottoms, or peace signs.  It was the last year of high school, and the first summer before college.  A new heartbreak every month.  Prom.  Surfing after class.  Cheaters.  Girls with tattoos.  Gossip.  Drunken singalongs to Deja Entendu.  We were there for it, and we knew it was going away.  The whole scene was a high school swan song.

Once college started, time for venues and music searches gave way to frat parties, actual girlfriends, and “class”.  Those years, musically, were spent in a haze of growing my secret obsession with Nine Inch Nails, trying to understand Radiohead, falling head over heels for Joy Division, exploring underground electronic music, and occasionally dipping my toes in the old scene… just out of habit.

The bands I loved sold out, which is another way of saying they just continued to do what they’d been doing and I grew out of them.  I’d like to think the rage I felt because of that was the reason for my mistakes like Atreyu, Killswitch Engage, and As I Lay Dying.  Somewhere around the birth of Paramour or something, I had to cancel my membership.  I cannot endorse this sort of behavior any longer. The time between me loving a band and me disavowing all knowledge of ever liking them was getting incredibly short.

I felt like that one disciple who denied Christ three times before the cock crowed.

In retrospect, a real bitch move.

So, with that said, here it goes:

I’m 25, decently intelligent, and I am aware the incredible importance of being hip in today’s society — but I occasionally listen to Blink 182’s Enema of the State.  Sometimes I listen to Tell All Your Friends or Pump up the Valuum at the gym.  Occasionally, I’ll even look up Rufio on YouTube (and clear my history/cookies afterwards).  It’s not a problem, I totally have it under control.  I just like the way it feels.  It makes my life flash before my eyes.  I understand how this sounds.  I am a grown man.

“When I was a child, I thought like a child, I acted like a child, but when I became I man, I put away childish things and then took them out again later when no one was looking.”

I’d like to think everyone has one album that really changed it all for them when it came out.  For years, you are this formless goop that goes with the flow of whatever is around you.  And then That One Album comes along and you say fuck that other stuff, I’m going to keep going this way for a while.

So don’t turn your back on it, no matter how embarrassing it looks in the rear view mirror.  Sing it out loud.  Own up to it.  You’ll feel better.

Last year, my blood-brother Watty and I were discussing the layered indictment of free trade and class structure in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.  Our roommate Goose was hopelessly confused.  Watty sighed and gave him a trademark quip: “If you really want to join the conversation, think about three levels up from wherever you are in your brain, and I’ll try to reach down and grab you, okay?”

Goose shook his head and asked, “Where do you guys get this stuff?”

Nick and I stared at each other dumbly.

“I dunno,” I shrugged.  “Just from like, knowing things.”

As much as I love that answer, it is a total sham, as most of my answers are.  The origin of our astounding “smartitude” comes from three sources:

1. excellent parenting/grade school education
2. reading the newspaper
3. digging through Wikipedia Tunnels for recreation

Wikipedia Tunnels are those strange gaps in space/time where you start out looking up Franz Kafka, and you wake up 3 hours later and there are 30 open tabs on the browser and you’re reading about Azura Class Warships from Star Trek Deep Space Nine.  Those missing hours are a haze of speed learning.  Some may consider this a waste.  Those people are as wrong as the Jem H’Adar were when they thought they could rebel against The Founders in Season 4.

It’s an easy mistake to make.

The real prize of Wikipedia Tunnels is that the material in general doesn’t matter.  The attitude of the tunneler does.  The easiest way to get the most out of this exercise is to remember that you are an assortment of combusting fractals and energy reacting with the fractals and energy around you — no separation between anything — but if that mindset is spiritually impossible, fear not.  [Much of that attitude comes from my history of being read A Wrinkle in Time before bed each night]

An amateur tunneler can start, at the very least, by keeping in mind this question:  How does this information apply to me, my generation, and our current situation?

BE CAREFUL

Wikipedia’ing something like “the Pope” can be a mentally intense experience.  Truth is almost always extremely scary, and the most “serious” of issues generally look hideously ugly when inspected up close.  Entries on serious subjects are like hard drugs.  Look what they did to Julian Assange:  the whole WikiLeaks project is like Requiem for a Dream.  A captivating exploration of loss, deftly edited.  A eulogy for our grandfather’s American Idealism with painstaking honesty.  No happy endings.  For mature audiences only.

So to be safe, start small.

WIKIPEDIA YOUR CHILDHOOD SHOWS

If you were like most children my age, you had at least one hour’s worth of TV time allowed to you everyday.  If you sat in on a lecture for an hour every day for a year, you probably learned something whether you wanted to or not.  Now’s a great time to freshen up on what shaped you.

Rocco’s Modern Life

Rocco was a chilled out wallaby.  He had an incredibly relaxed and optimistic outlook on life despite being surrounded by an urban dystopia run by the evil Conglom-O Corporation.

Conglom-O Corporation is the biggest company in town; it even runs City Hall. […] Conglom-O does not seem to have a specific purpose or product–it is a giant company that manufactures many products. Conglom-O’s slogan is always shown beneath its name. The slogan is “We own you,” revealing in a later musical episode that they own everything in O-Town. When Ed Bighead was shown to work at Conglom-O in 1961, the slogan stated “We Will Own You” (alluding to the future of megacorporations).

Rocco was a child of the 90’s, a first generation American learning to deal with the impact of the Regan-inspired ultra-capitalism.  The comedy was slap-stick potty-humor, but the situations were all based on real-life.  In fact, the creator, Joe Murray, often found himself baffled that his stories were interpreted as a kid’s show.

In 1992, two months prior to the production of season 1 of Rocko’s Modern Life, Murray’s first wife committed suicide.^[5] Murray had often blamed his wife’s suicide on the show being picked up. He said “It was always an awful connection because I look at Rocko as such a positive in my life.”^[6] Murray felt that he had emotional and physical “unresolved issues” when he moved to Los Angeles. He describes the experience as like participating in “marathon with my pants around my ankles.” Murray initially believed that he would create one season, move back to the San Francisco Bay Area, and “clean up the loose ends I had left hanging.” Murray said that he felt surprised when Nickelodeon approved new seasons;^[2] Nickelodeon renewed the series for its second season in December 1993.^[7]

Thank you, Mr. Murray, for pushing through and using your personal struggles to redeem yourself and entertain/enlighten an entire generation in the process.

Duck Tales

Yes, obviously, this was a show about fighting against the corporate greed and atavistic money hoarding of our parents and grandparents (or uncles)… and doing all this with the idealistic sureness of ducks who found solidarity in adventure as opposed to material goods.  But I know what stuck with you most.

The series theme song was written by Mark Mueller,^[4] an ASCAP award-winning pop music songwriter who also wrote the theme song toChip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.^[5] Episode background music was written by composer Ron Jones.^[6] In contrast to how other composers were creating a “patronizing” and “cute” score for the show, Jones says he composed the music with regard to the audience and its intelligence.^[7]

The DuckTales Theme was sung by Jeff Pescetto. There are four different versions of the theme song. The original version contained one verse, chorus, bridge, and then chorus. A shorter version of the opening theme was used in The Disney Afternoon lineup with the line, “Everyday they’re out there making Duck Tales, woo-ooh,” taken out. A full-length version of the theme song was released on the Disney Afternoon soundtrack. The full version contains a second verse, and it includes a guitar solo, which is performed with a wah-wah pedal while making duck-like noises. It also has a fadeout ending, unlike the other versions. There is also a rare extended version that was used in the read along cassettes in 1987. It has a sequence order of verse-chorus-bridge-chorus-instrumental break-chorus.

Woo-ooh!  This wasn’t kids stuff.  This was internationally groundbreaking television.

In Hungary the term “DuckTales generation” (Kacsamesék generáció) refers to the people who were born in the early to mid-1980s, because the death of József Antall, the first democratically-elected Prime Minister of Hungary was announced during a DuckTales episode in 1993. This was the generation’s first encounter with politics.^[10]

How’s that for a legacy?

Captain Planet

Almost everyone I know watched Captain Planet.  And it’s elementary to deduce that we were being Inception-ed with the concept of environmental concern at a young age.  It’s no wonder our generation has held onto it well into our twenties.  Almost all the cartoons we watched in the early 90s had a strong green hue.  But did you know Captain Planet also taught us about AIDS awareness and fearmongering?

“A Formula for Hate”

The episode titled “A Formula for Hate” (1992) was unique for the series in that it did not deal with environmental pollution or destruction. It was also the first episode in an American children’s animated series to directly deal with the AIDS–HIV pandemic (and also the first to directly mention sex on a children’s show).^[5] In the episode, Verminous Skumm brainwashes a local community into thinking the virus can be spread through casual contact, and thus causing people to hate and fear a young man, infected with HIV, named Todd (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris, with his mother voiced by Elizabeth Taylor).

Notice the appearance by NPH (who was in the closet at the time, but still delivering a very important message for tolerance towards same-sex relationships).  This is heavy stuff.

Bobby’s World

We were getting educated through that little black box.  Some of the themes were hidden.  Some just came right out and said it.  We were forced to decide, at a young age, who to trust.

Endings of the show also featured Mandel breaking the proverbial “fourth wall” by talking to viewers about the preceding episode. In some part of the episode, Bobby will break the fourth wall by telling the audience his perspective on life.

This shaped me hugely.  I was an only child and would spend hours and hours everyday alone with my imagination.  I had a bike (not a tricycle like Bobby).  And I had a stuffed Eeyore (not a spider).  But otherwise, we were pretty similar.  Even though I never trusted Howie Mandel (and still don’t), I trusted Bobby.  So when he broke the fourth wall and addressed me directly, he was sowing the first seeds of my techno-psychosis while also delivering a strong moral lesson.

But what moral lesson?

17	“Nightmare on Bobby’s Street“	September 28, 1991
Bobby is scared of a mysterious house until he meets the man who lives there. This episode parodies the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.

This episode taught me about the perils of ignorance — how it can lead to fear, bigotry, and isolation.  On top of that, Howie Mandel brought me the themes of To Kill a Mockingbird when I was 6.  Thanks, man.  I could almost forgive you for Deal or No Deal now.

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

Ted Theodore Logan has always been one of my role models.  I watched this movie endlessly on premium movie channels after its release.  I wanted, desperately, to believe that if I followed my passion and tried to do good… I could save the world without turning into one of the incredibly lame people we usually put in charge of such things.  We all want to change the world – but I wanted to look like an idiot while I did it.

And these “dummies” were enlightened.

When Bill and Ted are asked “What is the meaning of life?” they reply with the lyrics from “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison.

I don’t endorse Poison, but I do endorse those song lyrics as an acceptable answer for the meaning of life.  And the introduction course to time-travel paradoxes and philosophical worm-holing presented in the third act would come in very handy later in my life.  This Wikipedia entry also reminded me that I used to watch the Animated Series… which is currently embroiled in a fierce legal battle over ownership rights.  No DVDs anytime soon.

—

TAKE A BREAK FROM THE SELF

You can learn wayyyy too much about yourself while you’re deep in a Wikipedia tunnel.  So when you get exhausted looking into the mirror, try looking through it.  There are many questions and topics to dissect. For instance:

What are your immediate speculations as to the type of person who filled out the character bios for the environmentally conscious children’s animated series Biker Mice From Mars?

Some of the information was harvested from various fan sites, but the person actually in charge of streamlining it — with journalistic ideology and unbiased integrity maintained — is an interesting subject for study.

I, for one, am happy that a man with such triviatic knowledge was able to finally find an outlet where he could reach his target audience.  Imagine having such mundane tidbits of fact stuck in one’s head… They could eat you alive, those Biker Mice going to town on your frontal lobe.

And what a service he provided while emptying his brain of all that “useless” information!

I don’t know if your memory can reach back this far anymore, but do you remember how frustrating it was when you couldn’t remember an actor’s name in a movie?  I’m talking pre-IMDB.  It’s no wonder our parents are crazy.  Not being able to remember the eyepatch mouse’s name (Throttle) is enough to drive someone over the edge.  That feeling is excruciating.  How much would you have paid to make it stop?  Well, it’s free now.

We’re a spoiled generation.

This is why I’ve donated to Wikipedia multiple times in the past, and why I’ll continue to do so.  It’s the only organization that’s ever received any of my money.  It’s worth plenty just to keep it ad-free and out of the paws of those who would seek to manipulate the power of knowledge for their own twisted ends.

And trust me, that day is coming.  Power corrupts.  Evil always takes over.  We own you. But the Good that’s there now, it can last a lifetime — if you download it into your brain.  So go on, get it while it’s free.  Find something random.  Look at it.  Then look closer.  Then extrapolate.  Then look back.  Now climb a few rungs up.  You will get dizzy.  You might even black out for 3 hours.  But when you wake up, you’ll have more than you went in with and you’ll be higher up the brain-ladder.  And then you’ll be able to reach down and help someone else climb up, too.

Happy tunneling.

I met Christine at a bar.  She had an MFA in journalism, and was currently interning for Rolling stone.  She said Lady Gaga was “a genius”.

My hand involuntarily reached for the Beretta tucked in the back of my pants, but I stopped myself.

No, not here.

People have asked me before what my goal in life is.  The answer is simple.  My goal is to not kill myself.  This is not an easy task.  Music helps.  People like Christine do not.  It’s a tough choice, Sophie-from-Schindler’s-List-Style, as to whether Christine or I deserved the single bullet in that metaphorical Beretta chamber.

Get me my chalkboard, let’s dig in.

So, it’s 2011, and we’re squarely in the middle of the electronic music generation.  It’s a perfect fit.  We structure our jobs, our relationships, our governments, and our recreation with our technology… why not our music?  Those who say that electronic music has no soul are the same people who bought Passion Pit CDs.  They’re not wrong, they’re just slow — and working with what they know.

“I think, fundamentally, music is something inherently people love and need and relate to, and a lot of what’s out right now feels like McDonalds. It’s quick-fix. You kind of have a stomachache afterwards.”

– Trent Reznor, Salt Lake Tribune Interview (29 September 2005)

Electronic music has given us not only a new genre, but a rapidly expanding and splintering one.  The popular consensus of those “in the know” is that it’s growing faster than we can name it.  That’s fast. And in the clusterfuck confusion, a lot of people are getting credit for copying off of other people’s tests.  Not chill.  Let’s dish out some credit where it’s due.

“Ideas are like fish.  If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.  Down deep the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

– David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish (2007)

Kraftwerk is the granddaddy of the scene.  These men, we’ve learned, were visitors from the future in 1978 (with their seventh record, The Man Machine) when they basically invented house music.

Kraftwerk – Minimum/Maximum

They saw it coming.  Even down to the theme of “Man/Machine”.  And yet, they are barely now getting recognition for what they started.  When Daft Punk pirated the entire concept of Kraftwerk, watered it down to make it more socially acceptable, and then added some bounce to attract 12 year olds… it still needed the help of Kanye West in “Faster Stronger”.  Finally, in that unholy year of 2007, people praised Kanye and Daft Punk for introducing something “new”… 30 years after it had been done much more intelligently.

Aphex Twin was basically Nostradamus in 1999 when he released “Windowlicker” — the title, the sound, the progression, the video… it all paints a portrait of the genre’s future.

Aphex Twin – Windowlicker

It starts out as a sexy 4/4 dance beat, as innocuous as the thousands of other club anthems of the late 90s … harmless, saccharine, playful…   just a few cross-dressing or transgender people looking to have a good time, the envy of the gangsters in the worn out classic vehicle… hey I wish we could get in on that shit… then it begins to break down… glitch, trip, switch time signatures… until finally, it rumbles into dark, dark territory with an ugly side… before finally crushing under its own weight and delivering a disturbing view of the face behind the dance… and the audience is forced to sit in silence and wonder if what they just saw and heard was a joke, or serious.  And as the years tick by on our digital calendars, the more we realize how serious he was.

There’s enough depth in a 30 second clip of an Aphex Twin or Kraftwerk song to sustain the entire career of one stagnant (and rich) musician — and the evidence is all around you.  But they weren’t satisfied with 30 seconds.  They went all the way. They were over 25 years ahead of the curve… we’re only now catching on to everything they were trying to say back then.  Maybe that’s why their newer stuff has sounded so shitty.  We’re cavemen staring at a TV set.  What the hell is this?

“I want it to be all back together again; I want to go out to a club and listen to all different types, not just one specialist type.”

–  Richard D. James

Do you remember how frustrating it was in grade school when you knew the answer to a teacher’s question, raised your hand, and she still wouldn’t call on you?  Now imagine holding your hand up for 25 years until Ke$ha blurts out a poorly worded, watered down, annoying-sounding version of your answer.  And then gets awards and millions of dollars for it.

She won’t be the first.  Kanye did it with his song “Runaway” by copying a 5 year old sound, almost note for note, and turning it into a slamming hit.  Look at him pushing boundaries! And if that’s frustrating for me, it surely must be frustrating for the old pioneers.  Some Christines of the world will say, “Oh, don’t blame Kanye, he just took something out there and made it better.  Facebook did it to Friendster.  Google did it to Yahoo.   He brought it to the mainstream.  It’s the American Way.”

Now that’s not only a sad comparison, but it’s a dumb one, because in business, the 2^nd generation generally improves on the last.  This isn’t the case with music.  Britney Spears, for example, who hired a one-dimensional, second-rate dubstep DJ, Rusko, to produce her new album, is vastly dumbing down the pioneers of new sound.  Maybe there’s merit in that.  Perhaps people “aren’t ready” to hear something new.  Their heads may explode.  She’s bridging the gap, making sure the 12 year olds are safely on their way to avant-electronica, instead of dangerously jumping in to someone like Burial who might make them realize that mainstream artists created in a boardroom are, in fact, talentless hacks designed to pickpocket naïve children.

But more likely, there is no merit in that.  It may in fact be entirely evil.  She’s slowing us down as a species.  If she’s going to “do us a favor” and bring something to the mainstream, why leave the real beauty of it hidden?  If someone’s head is going to explode, let it explode.  Darwin would be proud.

People say to me, “Oh, Bill, leave them alone.  They’re so good, and so clean-cut, and they’re such a good image for the children.”  Fuck that! When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?  I want my children listening to people who fucking rocked!  I don’t care if they died in pools of their own vomit!  I want someone who plays from his fucking heart! “Mommy, the man Bill told me to listen to has a blood bubble on his nose.”  SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO HIM PLAY.

–  Bill Hicks, on the topic of New Kids on the Block, George Michael, Madonna, et al.

It’s the way of the world.  The true geniuses usually go on to generate a fiercely loyal, but small, fan base… and then the locusts come in, steal the idea, make things worse, and collect awards on stage while wearing suits of stitched-together hundred dollar bills… hundred dollar bills which were earned by suing teens who shared their ripped-off watered-down music online.  And there will be no time for these copycat thugs to say thank you, they’ll be too busy counting “Most Innovative Artist” awards.

I don’t know why things are this way.  It may have something to do with our abysmal education system.  In an increasingly experimental artistic field, it can be difficult to immediately determine who is actually talented and who is just fucking around.

The best argument for liking a song is “it sounds good to me.”  That’s an absolutely acceptable answer.  But it’s no qualification for “genius”.

“You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it’s really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.”

– Stanley Kubrick, Newsweek (26 May 1980)

A true work of genius, in my opinion, can appeal to a wide audience.  And it can give each subsection of that audience something different.  It can insert clever messages and show-off-moves that non-experts won’t see.  And it can speak to the man who just happens to stumble across it in a car commercial.  All shapes and sizes.

And at the same time, a work of genius has to provide much more with each listen.

I mean, I read Catcher in the Rye when I was 14.  Then I read it at 18.  Then 22.  Let me tell you, it was a completely fucking different book each time.  And each time, it was sensational.  Who knows what I’ll see there at 26?

The more I hear Lady GaGa, the more I see her watered down version of the FameHateLove act perverted from the thousand of times it’s been done before, and her songs begin to fall into the predictable chord progressions of sugary disco — and it makes me physically nauseous when I think about young girls with her posters on the wall.

“I feel the same way about disco as I do about herpes.”

–  Hunter Thompson, in a speech to the University of Colorado Student Union

We have to look back, in order to see the genius that we missed.  The answers are there.  And they aren’t going to be spoonfed to us.

And we shouldn’t need them to be.  It’s sad that this needs to be said.  But tracing the source of things helps you understand their true value.  Without studying the history of a genre, a voice, or an ideology, we can fall for some pretty nasty tricks.

“I don’t want anybody to have the spotlight but me.  Don’t share.”

–  Lady Gaga, March 30th, 2010

If these artists were saints, they’d say, don’t worship me, worship my creators (my fathers, my influences), and rejoice in the music (the eternal, the holy spirit).  But even Christ couldn’t get that one right, because he decided he was God half way through the New Testament.  Fame can really mess a person up.

What I’m starting to understand, what the very best understood years ago, is that it’s not the artists/politicians/singers/writers/messiahs responsibility to deliver the blueprints to their work.

It’s our responsibility to find them.  Checks and balances.  In a freemarket of artistic ideas and creative thought, it’s up to us, the fans, to set them straight.

And I think we should do it at the top of our lungs.

I guess that makes me a snob.  I don’t want to be.  The minute you say you like your usual stuff more than stuff you haven’t really listened to, you start to sound like you stopped reading books before you got to Green Eggs and Ham.

“I actually don’t read anything, because I feel like the haters really like to hate out loud, [and] that people who love sometimes love quietly. So I don’t really listen or look at anything. [But] in general, f— the cynics. Go be cynical … I’m having a good time. Like, who would you rather hang out with? That cynical dude or, like, me with my laser beams?”

– Ke$ha, Entertainment Weekly

I have no laser beams.  I don’t care what you hate and what you love.  But I’ll take the title of cynical snob over the title of thieving ignoramus if I have to.

Because spreading awareness for the saints who slipped through the cracks is better than becoming fan #4,005,288,179 of a plastic person.  Because some people are trying to trick those who are less aware.  Because others are trying to shed some light but they’re getting buried in bullshit.  Because I know the tremendous pain of sitting with a hand up, knowing an answer, and watching idiots get called on left and right.  So if I can’t get called on, I’m at least going to try and get my friends and heroes called on, because I know they’re going to call on some other awesome people, too.

And there are so many, it could take a lifetime to list them all.

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC.”

–  Kurt Vonnegut, “Vonnegut’s Blues For America” Sunday Herald (7 January 2006)

It’s enough to keep me from pulling the trigger.

Happy digging.

It’s a cold world for a bachelor.  Nothing makes sense.  Our expectations have been spoiled by cinema and literature.  We’re a bunch of apes living in Babel, none of us texting in the same language.

I’ve been out there in the field for a while now.  I have a few soul-rattling heartbreaks under my belt. Women have beaten me up worse than an extra in Fight Club.  But there are a few things I’ve learned at the price of disillusionment and rejection.

Disclaimer:  This post is focused on relationships, dating, and winning female hearts.  If you are more interested in the sexual side of things, I highly recommend you check out Dave Glenn’s section of the site.  The man is an anomaly.

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THINGS THAT DO NOT WORK WITH GIRLS

Poetry. In high school, I had a huge crush on Heather.  One day, I decided to make my move.  I gave her a bouquet of shitty flowers I pulled from the ground.  They may have been weeds.  I tied them with a shoelace from my left Converse (which smelled exactly like a shoelace from an old converse sneaker), and tucked in a crumpled piece of paper.  On the paper, I wrote:

We are careening towards each other

Slowly

Time, geography, circumstance,

Dissolving

The obstacles between us

Melting

Soon there will only be

Us

The next day, Heather had informed the entire girl’s soccer team about “what a weirdo Matt is”.

I’ll never know if she understood the context of the shoelace and its inherent metaphor.   She made no comment on my progressive use of language or meter.  But she was still perfectly within her rights to classify me as a weirdo.  The line between stalker/serial-killer and suave-romantic is extremely fine.  To this day I’m still trying to find the balance.  I blame television.

Logic. I have this medical condition where I am always calling girls the wrong name.  Occasionally, the “wrong name” happens to also be the name of another girl I know.  Girls have no sympathy for my disability.  I’ve gotten myself in the doghouse this way a dozen times at least, and I’ll get there the same way a dozen more.  A few years ago, while staring into my then-girlfriend’s eyes, I said, “I love you Janna”, which, entirely coincidentally, happened to be the name of a previous girlfriend.   My then-girlfriend ran into the bathroom and started crying.  I had a conversation with a voice behind a locked door, and it went something like this:

Me:  Baby, I’m sorry.

Her:  Fuck you!

Me:  I just say the wrong name sometimes.  I’ve called John “Shawn” before.

Her:  That’s bullshit.

Me:  You want to call John?  We can call him together if you want.  Or I can call, and you can listen in.

Her:  You’re not taking this seriously.

Me:  No, I’m not, babe, because this isn’t serious.

Her:  IT IS TOO SERIOUS.

Me:  Okay.  You’re right.  Let me explain.  For 8 horrible months, I mistakenly thought I was in love with Janna.  She was my love symbol.  But then you came along, and showed me how wrong I was for thinking that.  And then I fell in real-love with you.  Now you’re my love symbol.  So I got my labels mixed up, that’s all.

Her:  I AM NOT A SYMBOL.

Me:  Baby, Carl Jung would disagree with you.

Her:  I hate Carl Jung!

Me:  That’s ridiculous!  You’ve never even met the man!

After that, she started pounding her tiny little fists against the door until she finally tuckered herself out, whimpered a few unintelligible noises, and slept on the porcelain.

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THINGS THAT KINDA WORK WITH GIRLS

Romance. It was 80 degrees and pouring rain.  I had met Tasha a week prior – she was perfect.  We had all the same likes and dislikes.  She could keep up, or even outpace me, in just about any field.   One afternoon, she called and told me to meet her in the park by the water.  We went to an outdoor concert and watched some big-name bands play for free.  We stole bottles of wine and danced as we got soaked.  When the sun started to set, we ran up to the roof of a tall building and stared at the skyline of the world’s biggest city — tiny lights blinked through mist and skyscrapers stood like giants.  The word surreal didn’t do it justice.  Our eyes locked.  Her damp hair fell in her face (which looked better without makeup) and she smiled at me.

There’s just one thing I want to make absolutely clear I said.

I leaned in and kissed her.

And she didn’t kiss back.

Uh, was that it she asked.

She looked like she wanted to throw up.  Then I kinda wanted to throw up.  There seemed to have been some sort of miscommunication.  So I went back to her apartment, charged my phone, and left.

It didn’t feel like a complete failure, though.  I stand by my actions.  Romance and tragedy are close relatives.  And if you want to create a cinematic moment, you have to be willing to play the part of the loser now and again.  Besides, I got to kiss her and overall I still had a good time.  What base is that?

Being Yourself. The only exciting part about dating a woman, besides sex, is that you get to experience another human being.  You get to see her world, the things she likes, the things she does that differentiate her from the herd.  And that goes both ways.  So if you want to be the generic stereotype guy who takes a girl to an Olive Garden dinner and an Adam Sandler movie, then you are going to bag the generic stereotype girl who enjoys shitty food and shitty movies.  If that’s your thing, you don’t need my help.  Go out on the street and just swing a dead cat.  You’ll hit three women who match up with you.

But if you want someone interesting, you have to be interesting.  Take her somewhere she’s never been before.  Show her something you love that others don’t.  It can be as simple as a non-descript looking park where John Frusciante etched his name in a wooden bench when he was young.  Just make it unique.  This will either end magnificently or disastrously.  But it will filter out the chaff.  If you take a girl to a secret rooftop-drive-in Kubrick screening in Downtown LA and she isn’t stoked, then feel free to leave her up there when the movie’s over — don’t feel bad, she has plenty of things she needs to think about/re-evaluate.

Yeah, maybe she’ll be weirded out if you take her to ComicCon.  Forget her, then.  If Comics are your thing, stick by them, man.  You want to trade your childhood integrity for a hot body?  Go to a strip club, you sad, sad, soul.

—

THINGS THAT DO WORK WITH GIRLS

Flowers. Really?  Really.  It’s 2011.  How do you own a television and not know that girls like flowers?  Don’t be discouraged by Heather’s reaction to my high-school attempts at romance.  Send a girl some damn roses.  It takes slightly more effort than sneezing.  It probably won’t fix anything, and it might not win anyone over, but it’ll at least make her smile — and that’s a huge step in the right direction.  Be happy that it can be accomplished as easily as giving her some weeds she can watch rot on her bedside table.

Honesty. My freshman year of college, there was this gorgeous sorority girl.  She had the body of a sex-worker, the smile of a used car salesman, and the hair of an Herbal Essences commercial.  Everyone wanted her.  For some reason, she introduced herself to me at a party.  We talked, kind of.  She asked me to describe her in a word.  I looked her in the eyes and said, “Vapid.”  She blushed and thanked me for being “sweet”.

We dated for over 2 years after that.

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Happy Early Valentine’s Day, in the most ironic way possible.  You’ve got a week.  Make some moves.

Stokowski – A Night On Bald Mountain